There can’t be many 3-year-old teams in any sport that have established the sort of reputation and history associated with the Seattle Sounders.

Off the field, the club’s impact is significant and well known. Sounders fans have shown up in standard-setting droves, and last year the average attendance of more than 38,400 fans per regular season game eclipsed that of every soccer league on the planet save the English Premier League and the German Bundesliga. Seattle represents what’s possible for American soccer.

On the field, the Sounders also have established an identity. A winning record and playoff berth in 2009, their inaugural season, got it started. Claiming three straight U.S. Open Cup titles, which had been accomplished only once in nearly a century of competition, cemented their place in American soccer lore. But there’s a good chunk of failure mixed in with all that success. Three consecutive first-round eliminations in the MLS Cup playoffs have bruised their reputation, leaving many to ask if the Sounders are champions or chokers.

With all that baggage, Seattle flew to Torreón, Mexico, on Tuesday morning ahead of Wednesday’s CONCACAF Champions League quarterfinal decider against Santos Laguna (8 p.m. ET, Fox Soccer). It’s a game with plenty of potential history and one that will play a significant role in how this fourth edition of the Sounders will be remembered.

“I think it’s the most prestigious cup that any MLS team competes for,” coach Sigi Schmid said last week of the CCL. It’s also proven to be the most elusive.

While D.C. United and the L.A. Galaxy won continental titles in 1998 and 2000, respectively, the old Champions Cup was a shadow of the tournament it’s become. Back then, MLS clubs had to win only three home games to lift the trophy. In 2002, the competition was revamped to include home-and-away series, and in 2008 the current Champions League format was adopted. It’s been a struggle to say the least, with Real Salt Lake’s run to last year’s finals the only highlight in a decade of embarrassing setbacks for U.S. teams.

It’s been better so far during the 2011-12 season. Seattle has been joined by the Galaxy and Toronto FC in the quarterfinals (that series is deadlocked 2-2 and will be decided Wednesday night at The Home Depot Center—10 p.m. ET, Fox Soccer), and last fall’s group stage included the first two wins by an American club on Mexican soil. FC Dallas ended the hex in mid-August at UNAM Pumas, and the Sounders won at reigning CONCACAF champ Monterrey a week later.

All of that gives Seattle plenty of confidence it can secure the draw it needs in Torreón despite its MLS Cup failures. This team now is seasoned and ready for elimination soccer.

“The culture has changed. When I think about how far the club has come in just these past three years, we’ve made leaps and bounds,” Seattle midfielder Brad Evans told Sporting News on Tuesday. “You learn through the years and you go into situations now you’ve seen before. We’ve seen what these games bring, what these (Mexican) fans bring, the hotels, travel, it’s become a habit. It just becomes natural.”

Evans, who played twice for the U.S national team in January, has been a Sounder from the start and scored the game-winner against Santos last week. His team has played 17 matches in CONCACAF competition since the summer of 2010, including five against Mexican opposition. Schmid took the Sounders to Mexico during the preseason as well, where several exhibitions gave Evans and Co. more of a look at the style of play they’ll face Wednesday night.

“When their center backs drop to the side of the (penalty) box and their defensive midfielder gets the ball from the goalkeeper, if we hadn’t seen that before it would have been difficult to adjust,” he said, emphasizing how much Seattle has learned about the ability of Mexican clubs to seize upon small errors in a game’s late stages. “You learn from those mistakes, you learn to take what the game gives you and you learn not to make the mistakes that you got punished before.”

Seattle’s evolution in style helps as well. The team is more international, and more Latin, then it was when launched in ’09. The attack now runs through the likes of Mauro Rosales, an Argentine, and Uruguayan Álvaro Fernández. It’s more balanced, more dangerous on the flanks and more unpredictable. And it means the soccer played by Santos and others in Mexico feels less foreign.

In each of the three MLS Cup playoff series the Sounders have lost, they failed to take a lead into the second leg. This time they have one, having beaten Santos, 2-1, in the first leg, meaning they need only a draw to advance to the semifinals and a matchup with either L.A. or Toronto. Evans said that advantage was a key distinction between Wednesday’s challenge and the club’s previous home-and-home failures. No MLS club has won a game in Torreón. The league is 0-4-0 at Santos. But Seattle doesn’t need to win. A tie will more than suffice. It will change perceptions.

“We go into this a little more confident then years before. Before, we were fighting. We knew that second game was a do-or-die situation. This one, I think we have a little more confidence going down there,” Evans said.

That confidence can help players ignore the statistics that might stack the deck against them. For example, since the CCL kicked off in ’08, no Mexican club has been eliminated from the competition by a team from outside Mexico. Since the home-and-home series began in ’02, MLS is 1-for-13 against Mexican opposition, and it happened that first year when Sporting Kansas City knocked off Santos, of all teams, in the quarterfinals.

Evans said the Sounders don’t talk about their playoff failures. “It’s definitely not discussed in the locker room. I don’t even think about it,” he said.

So they’re probably not thinking about Mexico’s CCL dominance either. All that stands between Seattle and the semis is a team it just beat last week. Santos is two months into its season and the Sounders are just beginning, but the Mexican club played this weekend—with most starters—while Seattle was off.

History beckons. The good kind. Seattle will have its chance to exorcise its playoff demons in November. On Wednesday, they have a shot taking a step closer to something much more significant and setting another new Sounders standard.

“The MLS Cup is certainly an important championship. You always want to win your country’s championship, as is the Supporter’s Shield, as is the U.S. Open Cup,” Schmid said. “If you can win the championship of your confederation, if you can be the champions of that group, if you can lay claim to the title that says, ‘Hey, we’re the best team from Canada all the way through Panama,’ that’s something that’s pretty special and pretty unique.”